I agree with a nitpick: you may condition yourself to not care about her. You may also condition yourself to not care about whether or not she responds even if you do still care about her. More accurately, you're conditioning yourself to care less about these things, which may or may not result in not caring at all. And to be fair, part of the problem is that you (the hypothetical you) care too much about whether or not she responds/want to break up with you/whatever and maybe you care too much about her specifically.
I basically want to push back on the idea that saying "fuck it, she's just a girl" is harmful. It might not be, depending. Not that I necessarily think you're saying that, but it's easy to see how someone might interpret you that way.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page. Our general sentiment of "I will remind myself that the situation is not as awful as my anxiety is making me feel" is the same.
I basically want to push back on the idea that saying "fuck it, she's just a girl" is harmful. It might not be, depending.
Right! Depending on what you mean by that, it might not be harmful at all. But I think there's value in being really precise and unambiguous about which things to care less about, because otherwise you might accidentally stop caring about some pretty important things, thoughts being cache-able and all.
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more". This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.